


As Often Through the Purple Night

by orphan_account



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst-veined Fluff, Domesticity, Francis's Lack of Tact (which is a character in its own right), Improper Use of Historical Settings, M/M, Talk of Mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:28:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23910826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "So?"Francis's eyebrows climb a bit higher, forehead creased with concentration. It may be due more to the tightness of the buttonholes than to his words."So, you have hair.""Agrayhair."
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 11
Kudos: 89





	As Often Through the Purple Night

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the Terror Bingo prompt 'Vanity'. Title inspired by Lord Tennyson's lovely _Lady of Shalott_ , so horribly abused by me and Francis Crozier both.

James is combing his hair at the handsome, wax-gleaming dressing table he keeps his cologne and his shaving tools on when he notices it. A hair, snagged on the teeth of the brush: and a hair not of the expected color. 

_It is th_ _e_ _wrong_ _color_ , he finds himself thinking. He is touched by a suspicion. He shoved it away. 

Something at the bottom of his stomach flutters uneasily, as if at a breach of protocol, as he picks it up. He inspects it, slowly, carefully, and it confirms his hunch. The hair is paler than the rest, no trick of the light: ash-colored. Gray. 

A gray hair. 

The first thought which crosses his mind is, stupidly enough, _It can’t be_. And then, _Not to me. Not to me._

James sinks against his chair. It is a fact beyond minor; barely visible at all in the glare – the blinding, breath-stealing glare – of what they have survived. It is natural. It is nothing. He feels like he is going to be sick on his own rug. 

For a long moment, dazzled by the hair between his fingers and the implications of it, he forgets about anything else: the good and the awful alike. He forgets about the mangled ghosts still visiting him at night, leaving no footprints on the hardwood as they did not on the packed dust of King William's Land; about the party they attended at the Rosses that day, and the surprise of neither of them hating it, and Francis with the littlest Ross on his knees, bouncing him up and down in a passable impression of a choppy Atlantic sea. He forgets about the things he has now: the waking up in a clean bed – waking up at all – and not in pain, and with another breath brushing softly against his arm. 

It scares him, this moment of amnesia. It drives him mad. _It is nothing,_ James tells himself, harder than before. I _t is less than nothing_. 

_Not to me._

He hears footsteps approaching from the hallway. Realizes he's still holding the gray hair, like an offering. 

"James?" The steps are approaching. He knows it by heart: vaguely military, but swinging at the hips like the steps of any sailor. 

“Are you still awake? I am sorry for dozing off during your Tennyson reading. I swear, it was no subtle literary critique on my part." 

James considers his options. He thinks of throwing the hair away, or to stick it back on the brush teeth, before Francis can see it. The old instinct, the one telling him to smooth away the creases on his surface whenever someone – an audience – is likely to see him, has not gone away; but he does neither of those things. Stepping off the train in Euston station, gray-faced and barely able to stand, James has decided he was tired of playing that particular game; or at least he has decided to try and be the kind of man who would be too tired – too much _more_ and _less_ than what he was before the ice – to care about such games. 

Especially here, in his own home: the spacious, well-ordered home he's recently renovated for himself and the man clomping down the hallway. For comfort, he lets himself walk it in his mind, with its mixture of Navy rigor and of James's penchant for trinkets bordering on tasteless. Embossed walking sticks lie stacked beside the cabinet of Francis's charts; poetry books are tucked between touch-worn monographs on magnetic fields. Mister Darwin's Beagle-born speculations builds up the little tower of volumes on the coffee table alongside a collection of chosen works by Lord Byron – not two steps away from the velvet sofa which, probably, still bears the faint mold of Captain Crozier's body, fallen into a slumber halfway through _The Lady of Shalot_ _t_ _._ James loves every part of it; the schizophrenic geography of them. 

He cocks his head to the side, listening. Calls back, ‘In here, dear Francis!’ Waits. The clock hanging from the wall, a Chinese madness in carved ivory James has held on through his many moves and which Francis tolerates out of sheer devotion, hums through fifteen more seconds before the bedroom door swings open, and the steps stop somewhere at his back. 

"Oh! There you are." 

James turns. Francis is smiling. It isn't a particular dashing smile. Francis's teeth are solidly British and solidly middle-class, and therefore yellow like old ivory and slightly overlapping, gaping at the center. James knows he's secretly self-conscious about it, and prefers to be very frugal with his smiles, or to hide them behind his hand or the hem of his collar. He thinks it a pity – because if not as white and even as his own, Francis's smiles are always honest, and slightly dumbfounded at their own honesty: as if any reason of delight is an unexpected gift he had no inkling he would receive. 

“Here I am," James says; and smiles back. 

"You could have woken me up, you know? Instead of letting me snore on the sofa loud enough to give our poor housekeeper the shock of her life." 

"Many apologies. But you looked like you were deep asleep, at last – I didn’t want to break the spell." James gestures at their bed: sensible oakwood, the mattress just knobby enough to make their Navy-shaped bodies comfortable. "Care to join me in a proper bed now?" 

"Yes, _please_.” Francis gives a grunt. "I am calling it night, because there is no way I will make any progress with the bloody chapter anyway. Which is splendid news for you, I suppose, as it means you will not be subjected to another round of excruciating spell-checking anytime soon." 

James bristles, indignant on Francis's behalf. 

"I told you already, your spelling is not atrocious. It's just – personal. And believe me, not many Oxford graduates would be able to spell _h_ _i_ _eroglyph_ correctly either." 

Francis clicks the door closed behind him. "Considering the average brainpower of those among these gentlemen I had the pleasure to meet, that doesn't sound like much of a compliment,” he says. "And besides, they are – hopefully – not trying to write a book which aims to be both true to the good people involved and not to sound completely demented." 

“How fortunate, then, you can count on your own personal embellisher." 

"Who is also one English man who can spell ‘hieroglyph’." 

Francis lets out a yawn against his fist. He arches his back, spine popping liquidly; some hair still plastered to his forehead from the bundle he made of himself on the sofa. The creases of one of the embroidered cushions are still imprinted on his cheek. It makes James thinks of cats, as it is so often the case with Francis. (More exactly, of one cat: the stout ginger tabby from the Club's gardens which has never let anyone approach it, not even Goodsir, usually beloved to all creatures, but suffers James to pet it between the ears, and whom James has coveted to snatch up and adopt for weeks now.) It makes him think of warm things, homely things, the clean, safe places you wrap yourself in after a long day in the world. 

Tentatively, James thumbs his brush; the single mismatched hair feeling impossibly hard under his touch, white-hot. 

_He will understand,_ he tells himself. _Or he won't, but he will still listen,_ _and won’t think me a fool for this thought,_ _and won't let me_ _get lost in it_ _._

Francis stops rubbing at the embroidery marks on his cheek. How long will it take him to realize something is off: the brush, James's hand slightly white-knuckled around it? Four seconds, five – there. Francis draws closer to the dressing table, eyes on James's sitting form. He crosses his arms. 

"Come on, Fitzjames," says Francis. "You're brooding, which is, as you know well, my job. What's the matter?" 

James sighs. He wants to tell Francis; there is nothing he wants less in the universe. To tell it is, after all, to make it true. James Fitzjames has always had a rocky relationship with truth, even if he got better at it. 

But yes – he _has_ gotten better at it. So he shifts in his chair, and holds the hair under the light: it glimmers there, graceless, undeniable. 

"I – I found it while brushing my hair," he explains; feeling slightly idiotic once he said it. 

(James has never had a particularly easy time with silence, either.) 

Francis doesn’t snicker; doesn't even take his eyes off the hair, which makes James both grateful and jittery. A _tick_ from the overly-decorated Chinese clock, an echo in James's heart. Then Francis is leaning back, hands already reaching for the buttons of his waistcoat. 

James watches him work for three whole seconds. 

"So?" 

Francis's eyebrows climb a bit higher, forehead creased with concentration. It may be due more to the tightness of the buttonholes than to his words. 

"So, you have hair." 

"A _gray_ hair." 

James has taken great care not to choke on the word; still, something in his tone gives Francis pause. James sees his fingers linger on the last button, his head tilting back to cast him a glance over his shoulder. 

"Yes, a gray hair," Francis admits. "Which is a perfectly normal thing for men of any age – especially after the kind of queer madness we have been through, if you have any recollection of that." He shimmies out of the waistcoat, starts on the cuffs. "Just tell poor Ross – came out of the Antarctic with his head looking like he had just walked in from a snowstorm. I remember he was almost in tears at the idea of telling Ann about it." 

"Mh," James mumbles: a regular reply in Crozierese, uncharacteristically somber for him. The hair, damning and mundane, is still burning against his fingertips. 

"I mean it. There is nothing more natural in the world. And it's only _one_ hair, Fitzjames." 

As it is apt for someone with a mind as quietly methodical as Francis’s, there is a logic in the names he calls him with, too: _James_ for the everyday, the subtle marvel of having a routine and building it together – _dear James_ for making love, sighed into his ear or pressed into letter paper, the barbs of Francis's handwriting turning rounder around the letters of it. _Fitzjames_ is usually reserved for taunting, or for fighting – because they are both stubborn, headstrong men, and therefore have long since acknowledged they needed names and rules for properly butting heads too. Here it is pronounced softly, though: Francis pointing at his own hair, the loosened shirt falling around his wrist as he moves. 

(James may be perturbed and upset, but he is not blind to the nice things around him, or to the pleasant possibilities involved. He notices the stretch of bare skin of Francis’s arm, he sturdy muscle underneath; he folds the image away, like a pinch of exquisite Egyptian tobacco you mean to save for later.) 

"…And what I should say then," Francis is talking again; the wrist must have gotten James distracted for a moment. "I don't know if you noticed, but I'm not exactly free of that particular malady either." 

James shakes his head. "It is not the same. It is, ah, harder for me. You –" 

" –What? I can look like a discolored Irish scarecrow, while you're not allowed to be anything less than perfectly and glossily youthful in any part of your person? I see." Francis gives a shrug. "I have never had your kind of reputation to uphold, after all. Or maybe it's just a peculiarity of Jameses everywhere." 

He says it smiling; still, James feels the urge to slap himself and his stupid mouth. He wants to explain himself: the words come to him in a jumble, too many and too complicated to make any sense. 

_It is because you never wor_ _e_ _pomade or put cream on your hands to keep them from_ _going as veined_ _as a_ _n_ _old maiden’s,_ they say, _and yet Sir John listened to you more than he did with me,_ _if not enough_ _._ _It is because I observe you, when we are out together – and yo_ _ur hair, your face, is the last thing people_ _pay attention too_ _, your well-wishers and your ill-wishers alike._ _It’s because even now I am not sure there would much to find_ _inside my head,_ _if one was_ _scratched_ _away_ _all the_ _gloss._

“Please, James. Don't give me that pain-stricken face. I know you didn't mean anything nasty by it. And I'm fond of that very James part of you, too.” A flash of a grin. “Besides, you really shouldn't worry – you're still the handsomest man in the Navy, according to the yearning glances the unmarried maidens of London throw your way every time you drag me the receptions the Admiralty keep giving to congratulate us on not being dead. We are simply collecting years: it comes with not being dead." He brushes at James’s shoulder as he moves to the chest. "We will get old: thank God for that. And I’m way ahead of you in the process." 

Something unexpected there: a subtle cold, scraping at James’s breastbone. 

"I am afraid I am not following you, dear Francis" he says, a bit too fast. 

Francis's voice rolls out from behind the open lid of the chest, just out of the corner of his eye. He suddenly regrets not being able to look him in the eye. 

"Old age comes for all of us lucky enough to still be alive; I am no exception. Apart from the gray hair, my knees are not what they used to be. I fall asleep after a good lunch. I wear moleskin slippers and _like_ it, for crying out loud." 

"I don't see why this is –" 

"It _is_ relevant, James. You shouldn't fret about one gray hair: you're still young, and charming, and you just have to look at me to persuade yourself of the truth of the statement." 

The cold is still nestled there, just under his heart. James feels the blood pulse in his head. "What do you mean?" 

"That I am older than you, and it shows. As it should," Francis says. He seems to be busy looking for his nightshirt. “And that you will probably still turn heads when I'm gone, if you want my modest opinion." 

The words come to James – impact him – as if from the greatest distance. As he recalls from his anarchic grasp of physics, imparted in chaotic blurs of lessons by old ship-hands and benevolent captains more than by any actual schoolmasters, the direct effect of distance upon a falling object is an increase in the speed of the fall; in the crash at the end of it. He imagines the words as hail, the restless hail of the Arctic, almost ludicrous in its devastation, falling down from the sky upon him and the tarp of the camp tents: _feels_ the bruises left by the rock-hard ice on his skin, the subcutaneous craters in their wake. 

He leans back against the dressing table: the corners of the room spiraling away in a dazzle. He sucks in a couple breaths. He needs a third one before things coalesce back into their shapes. 

"What –"James has to stop. He has to stop and cut up the thought in smaller snippets, bite-bits, or it will choke him. "Francis, are you saying. Are you saying you expect to die before me?" 

The rustling of clothes-searching ceases. Francis stands; a guarded calm washing over him. 

"Of course I'll die before you," Francis – the man he has despised and cursed and then loved more fiercely than any other, whose hand was the last thing he saw of the world before nearly fading into nothingness – says. "I'm more than ten years your senior James. I _want_ to go before you. If there is still one scrap of decency I can require of the universe in exchange for the folly it put us through, it is this." 

James’s whole body grows still now: the pain of the blow turning into stiffness, needle-thin and prickling. There is a new tautness in his hands, the free one and the one still clutching the hair – both puckered with craters. He talks through an increasingly rigid mouth. 

"And when,” he says, “pray tell, have you come up with this particular conclusion?" 

"Since human lives have first started working like this; so fresh out of Eden, I imagine. And I have not decided it as a personal fancy, you know –" 

"But you want it. You do want it to happen." 

A pause. Then brutal, quiet: 

“I do. Quite obviously, I do.” 

"Ah.” 

“James –“ 

“And you didn't think you should have told me about this neat plan of yours?" 

He has known it was be the wrong thing to say the moment the thought came to him. He has imagined the splash of white – white, not red: a sort of livid blaze, way more serious than any rabid blush – spreading across Francis’s skin, his face closing up like a door slammed shut, before seeing it happen. Still, he says the words. 

Such is the price, James has found out, of being so attuned to another human being: you know exactly where to push so the other wants to bang your head against the wallpapered wall, and sometimes that is exactly what you want to do. 

"Oh, well – I did not know I needed to ask for your permission, Fitzjames." The chest's lid slams into place with a crack of thunder; the nightshirt search, the quiet night schedule coming with it, momentarily forgotten. "Because we're talking about my own bloody life after all – and not even about something I can safely hope to exert any control on. I'm not dying tomorrow – but I will die, whatever your opinion on the matter might me, and as you are both young and healthy, I expect you to be there once I am not, and I wish you to be. I was under the impression the musings around my demise were my own business, though apparently I was mistaken. Should I file in a formal request to the Navy next time I have to decide whether to have a plum tart or a lemon one, too, just to be on the safe side?" 

James feels himself seethe. He isn't, unfortunately, the only one caught between knowing how to make the other angry and being too furious to care about not making the other angry. And what he is saying, what Francis is saying – 

It makes sense, James thinks: that is the ugly thing about it. _As you're both_ _young_ _and_ _healthy,_ _I expect you to be there_ _once_ _I am not_ _._ James there to console friends, to give a speech at the ceremony, to care for affairs both mundane and sentimental: to grieve, and bring fresh flowers and picnic blankets on Sundays, and be there, and live on, remembering. James can picture it happen, in fresh precise detail: almost as clearly as he sees the half-clothed, scowling man in front of him. He can forgive Francis everything, but not the plausibility of that future. 

He balls his fists. He is as angry as a scared child. 

"Good grief, Francis," he says. "That is tastelessly gruesome, even for _you –"_

Francis loses all his residual color. His lips peel back from his teeth. James is nearly knocked over, left speechless. The quip about not telling him was a mistake; this is a catastrophe. 

"And nearly dying in my arms, James?" Francis asks; snarls. "Falling apart day by day while still insisting you're well enough to walk, mh? Begging him to live, at the same time you ask me to kill you?" He lurches to a stop, breathing hard, everything sharp, everything clenched – jaw and fists and shoulders. "How is that for tastelessly gruesome, uh?" 

He twists back. The room is engulfed in silence: the silence deep and fragile, as it is often the case after Francis raises his voice. There are men who never look more imposing or more triumphant than when they are screaming and raging, who seem to have been built for the specific purpose of going blotchy red in the face as shriek at anyone without the authority to throttle them for that. Francis isn't one of those men It makes his shouting a deafening thing. 

Seconds pass. James feels a rush of warmth flood his neck, his cheeks, his head full of limp vanities and still luscious hair. His gaze falls to the floor: nothing of Francis to see there but the shadow of him, wound-up with rage even in negative. 

_No_ , he tells himself. _No. You may be a self-absorbed fop, Fitzjames, but you won't be a coward._

He lifts his eyes. In the half-heartbeat it takes Francis to rearrange his face, he reads it. The shame heating James’s face drops to his stomach like a stone. 

_Oh – oh, yes: that. Of course, that._

Francis’s face is filled with the ice: with their days on it. The cold, always the cold – the bullet wounds weeping down his ribs. Francis's eyes, wet and red-rimmed and tired, the only real regret in leaving this world. 

If their roles had been reserved, if Francis had been the one rasping his life away on a cot, with rescue and safety scarcely ten miles away but still invisible, asking him to help him out of this misery and drinking him in with every blink of his eyes like James remembers he did, he is perfectly certain the image would have haunted him for the rest of his life: overlapped over every day, every gesture, the fact now you know how your beloved would look as a corpse. Being his own end they are talking about, James can go on days without remembering it: brushing it away like a fallen leaf stuck to his coat. But Francis? Can Francis brush it away like a leaf? James will not do himself the disservice of pretending he believes it. 

The thing born of shame changes shape, pulses. James decides to breathe through it; to put it to good use. He holds up one arm, beckoning. 

"Come here." 

"No." Francis is trembling: he can see the shivers ripple in the cloth of the shirt, the one he still has to take off. When he twists his head, turning farther from him, the light catches on the moisture in his eyes. 

"I swear I am not trying to get out of the conversation," James says. "I just want to continue it with you here." 

"We are having a fight," Francis replies: still barely able to talk through his teeth. Still looking away, but not moving away, either. "You don't cuddle while having a fight." 

"We are not having a fight." A pause. James licks his lips. "Francis, come here. Please." 

Francis doesn’t give in, not right away; the clock chirps out the hour as he grunts, and shuffles his feet, and tries for a scoff. Then, he's coming. Drifting over to James, the distance between them closing naturally, automatically, like the quiet snap of a woman's jewel box. 

James starts out slow, carefully; taking one of Francis's hands, letting his thumb skim over the hard pads of his fingers, linger on his pulse point. It's Francis who sets the pace. It’s Francis who sinks his free hand into James's hair, bends to press his nose against it; letting out a sigh, mouth brushing at James's earlobe. It's Francis who lets him weave an arm around his waist, and pull lightly, a silent offer, and it's he who slips into James's lap, one hand still pressed to his nape and one wrist still in James's hold. They sit there, making a ring of themselves. 

"I apologize," James says. For his questions, for forgetting so easily; for having nearly died and having asked the things he asked of him while dying. If he can't regret them, he can regret the pain they caused. "It's just – I don't like it. I don't like you talking about you leaving me alone, Francis." 

Francis stiffens subtly in his arms; then he gives a nod, settling against the nook of James's shoulder. "I understand, James. I do. And I'm not particularly fond of thinking of my own end either. But, I don't want to think of the other option." James hears him swallow: hears the effort in it, in plucking these words out of himself, like barnacles stuck to the bottom of the ocean. "I don't want to think that I could be the one to live past your time. To be forced to still exist in a world bereft of James Fitzjames, and his ridiculous posh concerns and Tennyson reads." 

"Francis…" 

"I have already risked it once," Francis interrupts him, not ungently. "Does it really come as such a surprise I want to believe I will not have to do it again?" 

Francis’s hand is very soft against his hair. James wants to take it and kiss it. James wants to scream at this fool of a man until he has no voice left. 

“And what about me, mh?" he asks, slightly breathless. "Do you think it would be any easier for me, to live in a world where you are in a grave? That it terrifies me any less than it terrifies you?" 

Francis blinks. He shifts a little in his hug, standing straighter, moving closer. "No," he says, "no, I. I don't think it would, James. But as far as I'm concerned, I have no intention of dropping dead in the middle of the parlor anytime soon. I _will_ grow decrepit and cranky – well, crankier – but, I'm not quite there yet." 

"Do you mean it?" James asks; realizing how bad he needs an answer to that question. A memory, the whiskey mist thick in Francis's cabin, Lady Silence's bronze face floating in the fading light, terrible and polished and true. Francis starting at her voice, the terrible shock of the proven guilty: w _hy do you want to die?_

"I do," Francis says now; he doesn’t hesitate. "I promise you I will do anything in my power to make sure you are forced to put up with me for a good more years, James Fitzjames. You're warned." 

James tilts Francis’s chin up until he meets his gaze. "I shall hold you up to that promise," he says. Only a quarter of him joking, probably less. 

Francis smiles. 

"Fair enough." 

He yawns, mouth moving against his neck; again, James is reminded of cats. _Whatever happens, now he's here_ , he thinks, sick with relief. _He's still here enough to be like a cat, to yawn_ _against_ _my shoulder,_ _to touch me with his lips and his teeth,_ _and this means he is alive. He is alive._

"Can we go to sleep, now?" 

"With pleasure," James says. He can't help the wobble in his voice. "And do you believe we also restrain ourselves to only intermittently discuss your more or less impending mortality, Francis?" 

Francis gives a chuckle. Agrees to the conditions imposed. James’s legs have started pickling, rubbery with the weight of Francis pressing down on them. He has no intention to move one inch out of the way. 

"Then let us go to bed," Francis says, "and let start it all again tomorrow." 

"Correspondence and endless Navy invitations and manuscripts to edit and spell-check halfway to madness," says James. 

"Exactly." Francis pushes himself back to his feet. "I look quite forward to it, to be perfectly frank." 

James smiles; lets him go back to the chest and the nightshirt-- only giving in a little to the temptation on holding on him, fingers lingering down the line of his arm. He turns back to his mirror, his brush; slips into his own nightshirt. 

These are the things James Fitzjames has now: he shock of cold of the floor against your bare feet before stepping onto the knots of the Axminster rug; the bother of forgetting the lamp when you're both already snugly tucked in. The smell of him by your side, in the large bed your household staff is so unfalteringly excellent at pretending away: the smell always clean, like beeswax; always warm. It is enough to make a man (James, and all the Jameses tucked into his chest, the boy from Hertfordshire and the rascal fishing for bullets and glory and the thing emerged out of the North, carved out and marginally wiser) press closer to the body beside his, muttering excuses about the chill of January nights. It is enough to make a man pray: let this last, for months, for years, even decades. 

(One thing James has never been accused of, in none of his incarnations: to be afraid of being hungry for things.) 

It's only later, as Francis's drowsy mumbles starts filling the dark, as London shifts and hums in the suspended hours between late night and early morning, that James touches his right hand, and remembers the hair: gray and wrong and now lost. 

He has no idea where it is. He has no interest to know. 


End file.
